GET SMART WITH GAMES
Watch kid versions of the TV show Brain Games to discover the science behind how your brain can be tricked.
Photograph by Jack, Nat Geo Kids My Shot
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GET SMART WITH PHOTOGRAPHY
Smart kids are observant kids—and nothing sharpens those observation skills like photography. Watch the Ready, Set, Zoom! Series to learn how photographers capture extraordinary animal images.
Photograph by MATTHEW RAKOLA
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GET SMART WITH ART (AND A LITTLE SCIENCE)
Plus, check out these other tips to inspire art in your kid—at home, in the car, or even outside.Got More Time? With supervision, older children can tune in to National Geographic, Tuesdays at 9 p.M., to watch Genius, a scripted series about Pablo Picasso’s life. Missed a few? Watch full episodes here. Rated PG-13.
This story appears in the May 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia houses an array of singular medical specimens. On the lower level the fused livers of 19th-century conjoined twins Chang and Eng float in a glass vessel. Look closely at the display, and you can see smudge marks left by museumgoers pressing their foreheads against the glass.
The object that fascinates them is a small wooden box containing 46 microscope slides, each displaying a slice of Albert Einstein’s brain. A magnifying glass positioned over one of the slides reveals a piece of tissue about the size of a stamp, its graceful branches and curves resembling an aerial view of an estuary. These remnants of brain tissue are mesmerizing even though—or perhaps because—they reveal little about the physicist’s vaunted powers of cognition. Other displays in the museum show disease and disfigurement—the results of something gone wrong. Einstein’s brain represents potential, the ability of one exceptional mind, one genius, to catapult ahead of everyone else. “He saw differently from the rest of us,” says visitor Karen O’Hair as she peers at the tea-colored sample. “And he could extend beyond that to what he couldn’t see, which is absolutely amazing.”
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Albert Einstein epitomizes genius, which has led to an abiding interest in his brain. In 1951 the physicist’s brain waves were recorded; after his death in 1955, a pathologist mounted and dyed slices of it on glass slides. Many of those slides (right) are at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Photographs by Philippe Halsman, Magnum Photos
Throughout history rare individuals have stood out for their meteoric contributions to a field. Lady Murasaki for her literary inventiveness. Michelangelo for his masterful touch. Marie Curie for her scientific acuity. “The genius,” wrote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “lights on his age like a comet into the paths of the planets.” Consider Einstein’s impact on physics.
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Philosophers have long been pondering the origins of genius. Early Greek thinkers believed an overabundance of black bile—one of the four bodily humors proposed by Hippocrates—endowed poets, philosophers, and other eminent souls with “exalted powers,” says historian Darrin McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius. Phrenologists attempted to find genius in bumps on the head; craniometrists collected skulls—including philosopher Immanuel Kant’s—which they probed, measured, and weighed.
And it requires the ultimate expression of too many traits to be simplified into the highest point on one human scale.
. After seeing an apple fall perpendicularly to the ground in 1666, Isaac Newton reasoned that, in a friend’s telling, “there must be a drawing power in matter.” The tree that sparked his law of gravity remains rooted next to his childhood home at Woolsthorpe Manor, England.
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One of these networks fosters our ability to meet external demands—activities we must act on, like going to work and paying our taxes—and resides largely in outer areas of the brain. The other cultivates internal thought processes, including daydreaming and imagining, and stretches mainly across the brain’s middle region.
Prodigious productivity is a defining characteristic of genius. The drawings include a sketch of a seated figure (right) who appears on a tomb in the chapel above.
Charles Limb, a hearing specialist and auditory surgeon at UC San Francisco, designed an iron-free keyboard small enough to be played inside the confines of an MRI scanner.
Some 10,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins are part of geneticist Robert Plomin’s longitudinal study at King’s College London, providing clues about how genes and environment affect development. The genetics of intelligence are enormously complex. “Most geniuses,” says Plomin, “don’t come from genius parents.”
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A preliminary comparison of one “genius”—Newberg uses the word loosely to distinguish the two groups of participants—and one control reveals an intriguing contrast. On the subjects’ brain scans, swaths of red, green, and blue illuminate tracts of white matter, which contain the wiring that allows neurons to transmit electrical messages. “The more red you see,” Newberg says, “the more connecting fibers there are.” The difference is notable: The red section of the “genius” brain appears to be about twice as wide as the red of the control brain.
“This implies that there’s more communication going on between the left and the right hemispheres, which one might expect in people who are highly creative,” says Newberg, stressing that this is an ongoing study. “There’s more flexibility in their thought processes, more contributions from different parts of the brain.” The green and blue swaths show other areas of connectivity, stretching from front to back—including dialogue among the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes—and may reveal additional clues, says Newberg. “I don’t know yet what else we might find out. This is just one piece.”
Are geniuses born or made? Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, objected to what he called “pretensions of natural equality,” believing that genius was passed down through family bloodlines. To prove it, he mapped the lineages of an array of European leaders in disparate fields—from Mozart and Haydn to Byron, Chaucer, Titus, and Napoleon. In 1869 Galton published his results in Hereditary Genius, a book that would launch the “nature versus nurture” debate and spur the misbegotten field of eugenics. Geniuses were rare, Galton concluded, numbering roughly one in a million. What was not unusual, he wrote, were the many instances “in which men who are more or less illustrious have eminent kinsfolk.”
Stephen Wiltshire, a British artist with autism, created an exquisitely accurate panorama of Mexico City after one afternoon’s viewing and five days of drawing. Psychiatrist Darold Treffert believes that unique wiring between the brain’s right and left hemispheres allows people like Wiltshire to access reserves of creativity. Watch Wiltshire draw an entire city from memory.
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Advances in genetic research now make it possible to examine human traits at the molecular level. Over the past several decades, scientists have been searching for genes that contribute to intelligence, behavior, and even unique qualities like perfect pitch.
Genetic potential alone does not predict actual accomplishment. . These personality traits, which pushed Darwin to spend two decades perfecting Origin of Species and Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan to produce thousands of formulas, inspire the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth. She believes that a combination of passion and perseverance—what she calls “grit”—drives people to achieve.
Sometimes, by sheer good fortune, promise and opportunity collide. From these simple beginnings, Leonardo’s intellect and artistry soared like Schopenhauer’s comet. The breadth of his abilities—his artistic insights, his expertise in human anatomy, his prescient engineering—is unparalleled.
He persisted no matter the challenge. “Obstacles cannot crush me,” he wrote.
The company aims to develop programs that mimic the brain’s capacity for vision, language, and motor control.
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Craig Venter, are experimenting with techniques to obtain DNA from fragile Renaissance-era paintings and paper.
Hailed for his “otherworldly ingenuity,” Tao won the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 at the age of 31. Yet he rejects lofty notions of genius. What really matters, he writes, is “hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”
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“It’s as if he was creating stroboscopic photographs of stop-action,” says Sakmar. “It’s not far-fetched that there would be genes related to that ability.”
The quest to unravel the origins of genius may never reach an end point. Like the universe, its mysteries will continue to challenge us, even as we reach for the stars.
. Photographer Paolo Woods lives in Florence, Italy. This is his first story for the magazine.
Find out if you could be related to a genius with the new Geno 2.0 kit, available at genographic.Com/genius.
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